Susan and Willie MacDonald (centre) with their four adult children and extended family outside Middlehurst Station's farm store in Kaikōura. Photo / Dan Kerins
The old MacDonalds have a farm. If they pull off their ambitious plan, the young MacDonalds will get to keep it.
Susan and Willie MacDonald always knew they weren’t the “chosen ones”.
The youngest of three boys, Willie struck out on his own, leaving the Southland sheep and beef farm his grandfather had bought in 1918 to be handed down to his big brother.
Susan, one of six children, grew up across the water from Willie on the west flank of Lake Wakatipu, where her family’s remote high-country station was accessible only by boat.
“We’d always been told that Halfway Bay was going to the boys,” she says, in a matter-of-fact manner that suggests it’s not worth wasting energy on things you can’t change. “That’s how it was back then.”
As it turned out, the Halfway Bay farm was sold in 1991 – a year after Susan and Willie got married – when it caught the eye of a rich businessman on a fishing trip to the Lochy River.
The property changed hands again in 2022 for a rumoured sale price of more than $30 million. Oof. But, as a farmer’s daughter, Susan is pragmatic about the imbalance between rural land values and cash flow.
“Any one of us kids, if we’d been offered, would have been keen to take it over,” she says. “But it was still Dad’s farm and I suppose he could see there was a lot of debt he could clear and help set up some of us kids.”
She and Willie met in their early 20s at a homebrew evening. After spending eight years working together, managing Cecil Peak and then Mt Nicholas Station, they decided it was time to start writing their own succession story.
Marlborough was at the tail end of a two-year drought when the couple bought Middlehurst Station in 1998, fuelled by youth and naivety, with three pre-schoolers and a baby on the way.
Deep in the rugged, arid mountains of the Awatere Valley, on the Molesworth Muster Trail, the remote 16,550-hectare property was almost a blank canvas.
Cattle and merino sheep were scattered across vast tracts of rolling hills carpeted in yellow broom, hieracium and dead rabbits (calicivirus had been illegally released in New Zealand just a few months before).
Bordered by three rivers and the Inland Kaikōura Range, the station was sharply priced, reflecting its isolation and the difficulties of farming in such a harsh place.
“The land was here, which is what we were drawn to. But it was very raw,” says Willie. “If I’m brutally honest, I thought we had a huge opportunity to get the place going and then find something decent.”
In the early days, he and Susan did the bulk of the work themselves, riding out on horseback with separate dog teams and meeting at the end of the day to compare notes.
Despite the dust-bowl conditions, they soon discovered the animals were in “phenomenal” condition, thanks to the soil quality, spring-fed water supply and high sunshine hours. A vision of what might be possible began to take shape.
“I dare say there wouldn’t have been many women in New Zealand who would have taken it on, with three little ones and another one on the way, coming to somewhere like this with the challenges we had in front of us,” admits Willie.
“But Susan is incredibly capable. I need oxygen to survive, she needs ideas. That’s the absolute guts of it. And she’s always moving right on to the next one.”
Ask Skye MacDonald what it was like growing up at Middlehurst and her face breaks into a smile. “Epic!” she says. “It was so free-range.”
The youngest of the four MacDonald kids, she was born not long after the family moved to the station, spending her first few months happily bouncing around the farm in a bassinet strapped into the back seat of the truck.
For a while, there were so many children living in the valley that a correspondence school was set up for them at Middlehurst in one of the old farm buildings, using a pool at the homestead for swimming lessons.
For Skye, eventually following her older siblings to boarding school in Christchurch came as a shock. “I was pretty mute for the first two years,” she says. “It took me a while to come out of my shell.”
After leaving school, she completed a diploma in tourism and hospitality and moved to Australia for a couple of years, landing a hotel job on the Gold Coast before joining the superyacht circuit in France.
In late 2023, she was lured back home from the UK, where she’d been working as a groom for a polo club in the Cotswolds, to rejoin the family fold.
Now 26, she runs the Middlehurst Station Farm Store, a popular butchery/cafe on the main street of Kaikōura, where you can contemplate what to cook for dinner over a flat white and a crusty pie or cinnamon scroll made on site. Willie took some convincing about the merits of installing a coffee machine; that was one of Susan’s ideas.
“My parents have done wonders with the land,” says Skye, stopping for a quick long black while her cousin, Ava, takes over at the till. “So much care and thought has gone into it.
“It’s incredible looking back at photos of when they first moved there, you wouldn’t even recognise the place.
“But Mum and Dad have always wanted to be more than just a farm, and they’ve been really open about succession. ‘What does everyone want to do? Do you want anything to do?'
“They’re both pretty switched on and think out of the box – and it can fit all of us in. It’s not like, ‘Oldest son, here you go.’”
With Skye based in “Kaiks”, all four of the MacDonald children are now part of a network of interconnected businesses that have been designed to create a multi-generational legacy both on and off the farm.
During the Covid lockdown, sisters Sophie and Lucy presented their parents with a business plan for an online service, Middlehurst Delivered, that sends premium lamb and beef all around the country, with full traceability from farm to plate.
Lucy runs that operation from her home base in Mossburn, Southland. Sophie, who has a young family in Rangiora – and got married in the Middlehurst woolshed – handles staffing and accounts for both the store and delivery service.
The MacDonalds have also diversified into tourism, offering domestic and international visitors a taste of life on a high-country station.
When an old cob cottage used to accommodate farm workers collapsed in the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake, Willie and Susan replaced it with a 10-room luxury lodge that’s been used for everything from annual photography workshops to book club gatherings and a yoga retreat.
Constructed from cedar and black corrugated iron, The Quarters has stunning views across the valley and a live-in chef who creates the daily menu almost entirely from produce raised or grown on the land.
A couple of wood-fired hot tubs have been installed for moonlight soaks and there’s an outdoor brazier for starlit marshmallow toasting.
Guests can book a farm tour and sheepdog demonstration, picnic at a historic musterers’ hut, explore the mountain bike trails and collect fresh eggs from the farm’s riverside henhouse (a converted horse float).
Oystercatchers and endangered dotterels nest on the braided riverbeds and, in winter, the surrounding peaks are coated in snow.
One American tourist who flew in by helicopter was so taken by the station’s austere beauty that she scattered some of her late husband’s ashes from the window on her way out.
The Quarters is managed by the MacDonalds’ daughter-in-law, Joy, who grew up in the Bay of Islands but met their son Henry at a bar in Zurich on her OE. Almost overnight, she became one of the clan.
“A lot of the impetus behind trying to get this cranking is that Joy is here, running another business on the same bit of land,” says Willie. “That’s her natural spot, charming people. Which is not mine.”
Blenheim, the closest town, is a scenic but lumpy two-hour drive away. In winter, the southern route to Hanmer Springs can be accessed only by locals, although The Quarters remains open year-round.
Despite the isolation, Joy never had any doubts about moving to Middlehurst.
“Because of the lodge, there’s always people coming through,” she says. “And we’re a really tight-knit family. Henry and I go up [to the homestead] for dinner and I’ll go bike riding with Sue; it’s impossible to get lonely, really.”
She and Henry live in a tiny house on the station, where he runs the day-to-day management of the property and a finishing block in Cheviot.
Stock numbers have gradually expanded to some 500 Angus-cross cattle and 12,000 merino sheep, which supply wool to the likes of Icebreaker, Allbirds and Sheep Inc, a carbon-negative UK knitwear brand.
Twice a year, a shearing gang from Alexandra spends a week or so at The Quarters, with each of five bays processing 200 sheep a day in shifts that start at 6am, breaking for a high-carb meal every two hours.
Susan, who’s a skilled wool classer, is also in partnership with a wool mill in Italy that blends Middlehurst merino with silk to create an incredibly soft, lightweight textile. Another of her famous ideas in the pipeline is a plan to breed Valais Blacknose sheep to sell into the US market as pets.
Caring for the environment plays a big part in the MacDonalds’ ethos. After a biodiversity study of the entire station, two streams were put into QEII National Trust covenants. Wetlands have been fenced and a predator-control programme includes a network of monitored traps.
A natural spring provides fresh water, and options for developing hydro and solar power are being explored. Susan already uses solar-powered cups to milk Carol, the family’s dairy cow.
Lucerne, a deep-rooting crop that minimises the need for irrigation, is used for cattle feed. As for the impact of producing red meat, their philosophy is to eat less but better quality.
Now in their mid-50s, Susan and Willie are looking to gradually step back from the farm. That’ll be quite an adjustment, in more ways than one.
“I look back and think, gosh, we’ve done everything together,” Susan says. “It’s quite difficult to think about what I’m going to do for leisure or, you know, to relax. Yeah, it’s quite strange because basically what we’ve done all our lives is work.”
According to Stats NZ, there are more than 47,000 farms across the country, spread over 13 million hectares. Part of the problem for families like the MacDonalds is that land holdings have a minimum economic size and become unviable if divided over successive generations.
At the same time, expectations around who’ll get what have changed. As a farm succession guide on Dairy NZ’s website points out, the old-fashioned approach by which the eldest son would take over the farm – while other children received an education and the daughters were given their mother’s jewellery – is becoming less socially acceptable.
Litigation over rural inheritances has also become more common in recent years. Rotorua lawyer and farm succession planning expert Ian Blackman, author of Keeping Farming in the Family, has noted such actions often result in the farms being sold and family members not speaking to each other: “This is a sad legacy to leave.”
Exactly how it will play out at Middlehurst is still a work in progress. The past 12 months have been tough, as the station’s associated businesses look to become financially sustainable in difficult economic times.
“Most farming families would suggest what we’re doing is just making it bloody hard,” says Willie.
“The best – or the easiest – thing to do would be to sell in a few years, split her up and everyone has a go on their own. But then everyone would have a piece of nothing and the heartbeat would be lost.
“A good, simple farming business is still quite sustainable if it’s of a big-enough scale. And we’re lucky because we’ve got the next generation in, boots and all. I have tremendous respect for all of the kids. Their values are strong. Their tenacity and strength as a team.
“Yes, there are some challenges, there’s no sheltering from that. Let’s hope we can build it enough to be self-sustainable. We’ve got a vision and we want to grow together, but it’s a gravel road we’re travelling on, not a tar-sealed highway.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the New Zealand Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special interest in social issues and the arts.
